trying out the dynamic templates on blogspot

I am trying out the dynamic viewer that blogspot has recently added to their template collection: shapeshifterisland.blogspot.com/

Admittedly, there are a few problems with it - like no link list for example. The post titles are too big and you cannot make them smaller, so I did not give any of the posts titles. The bottom line is, unlike all other blogspot templates, this one does not allow you to edit the HTML. And the advanced customization editor is also very limited in what it can do. Just change colors and fonts basically. As I said, even changing font sizes won't work... Ouch!

And not all the viewing versions look good - the one called "snapshot" looks awful in fact. And you cannot disable them, the visitor gets the choice, which is always listed at the top. (Although I did sort of get around that one by making the type color the same as the background color - teeee heeee).

But still, for something like this that contains photos only, with no big explanations or anything to go with them, it is quite a neat little display system.

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free flash photo galleries + free swf hosting

Just stumbled upon this:

http://www.flash-gallery.net/index.html

A lot of these are freebies and some of them could look really cool on a custom designed header, or embedded into a page post as a photo gallery.

In order to be able to do this you will need to host your swf file somewhere - unless you have your own server or a remotely hosted site, that is. Here are a couple of places that seem to do the job, for free:

http://megaswf.com/ 

http://www.novamov.com/

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flickrslider, a very neat little app for slideshows and photo galleries

This comes to us from Fırat, who is scooting around in search of slideshows or photo galleries which he wants to embed into the amateur mobile photographers community portal that he is developing:

http://flickrslidr.com/

Uses your flickr sets to create slideshows. Very nice indeed, thank you Fırat! And keep 'em coming please! :-)

One small problem seems to be that you can only create a slideshow which has a square format. Anything narrow and the images slip to the bottom. The good news is that they give you the actual code which would make it possible to tweak this. As an example, along with being able to adjust the size, ideally I would also like this to loop rather than asking me every time if I want to replay it.

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ajax/javascript/flash image galleries

Here are some really good and popular image galleries that you can use in your web pages. All of them are free, however some do have Creative Commons licenses, so read carefully if you are thinking of monetizing your sites in future. All websites contain step by step tutorials on how to setup and customize the galleries, however most of them will require you to get your hands dirty, meaning you have to go into the code.

Ajax Galleries 

MiniShowCase

GreyBox

Lightbox (most popular, slick and cool design)

Javascript Galleries

Highslide (personal favorite, very customizable, probably requires the most coding among these)

Flash Galleries

DF Gallery

Flash XML Gallery

FlShow

Will be updated... Check back for more soon.

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